Wilton's arched recesses came into their own with Elijah Moshinsky's
production of The Turn of the Screw -- the second time Broomhill has
staged this opera (they did it highly successfully four years ago in Kent).
But this gripping new production, played almost in the round, with disregard
for proscenium, a central walkway and use of the upstairs gallery, trod
exciting new ground. So skilled was the use designer Philip Witcomb's hinged,
mirroring screen made of the reflected rear recesses that an entire Bly
-- the sinister house, akin to Jane Eyre's Thornfield Hall and Daphne du
Maurier's Manderley, in which the curious emotional entwining between children
and ghosts occurs in Henry James's novella -- was recreated in front of our
eyes. Quint (the young American tenor Shawn Bartels) didn't even have to
intone from Bly's battlements : he simply declaimed from the west gallery,
and the reflections did the rest.